Tara Ison - Rockaway

“So,” she says to Marty, feeling a little dazed. “Playland, huh?”

“Wait here,” he says. “I have to go get set up backstage, then we’ll walk around together. You okay? You cold? You want my jacket?”

“It’s ninety degrees.”

“It’s going to get cold, later.”

“I’m fine,” she tells him. “Look, I’ve got long sleeves. I’m just. . out of context here. Go ahead.”

“So, you wait here, right?”

“I’ll walk around a little. I’ll come back.”

“Well. . yeah, okay. Don’t get lost. Wait, you need some money?”

“Uh, no,” she says, blinking, smiling. “I’m fine.”

“All right. So later we’ll play a game, or go the Ferris wheel, or something. We’ll get ice cream.”

“That all may be a little too whimsical for me.” She has the sudden hideous image of his trying to win her a stuffed panda, but smiles at his hopeful face.

“Yo, Zale!” Tony is standing with a perspiring, grinning man wearing a battered 101.1 FM baseball cap, carrying a clipboard; both men wave frantically at Marty.

He waves back. “That’s Russell, the DJ. I have to go see about stuff now.” He hurries off in a rapid amble, a tall guy hunched at the shoulders, his curly hair flapping out from under the fedora.

Marty Zale & the Satellites.

Who is this guy? she thinks. What am I doing here?

MARTY FINDS HER an hour later sitting on a bench near the whirling Gondola wheel, eating a foot-long and drinking a Diet Coke; she had really wanted a Miller Lite, but it is only four-thirty in the afternoon and she doesn’t want him to see her drinking so early.

“What are you doing?” he asks. “What is that?”

“A hot dog. I was starving.”

“How can you eat that?” He looks disapproving. “It’s treyf .”

“All right. What’s ‘treyf’?”

“Impure. Filthy.”

“I thought that was hazerai .”

“Well. . it’s unkosher, then.”

“It is not. It’s Hebrew National.” She waves the wrapper at him.

He shudders at her, and takes a seat on the bench. “I’ll take you out for dinner later, afterward.” He scans the crowd, his eyes narrowing behind the dark glasses. “This is good, right? Yeah? All the families out with kids.” He chews his lip.

“Yeah. Are you nervous?”

“No, not really.” He looks at the jagged current of people. “Wow. Look at them.” A couple in their mid-seventies stroll by, dressed in matching Playland T-shirts wrinkled up over their stomachs and holding hands with a deliberate, tender consciousness. “That’s sweet.”

“Probably married sixty years,” Sarah says.

“Yeah. Three dozen great-grandkids. Still coming to Playland. Holding hands. Hey, there, look.” He points out a cluster of pre-teenish girls, roaming. Their braces flash, they giggle and grab at each other and swing their hair, their eyes darting around, watching, always looking. The ritual. Sarah remembers being one of them, a roaming, watching girl. She knows they smell like mint or cinnamon gum, and sweetish drugstore cosmetics, and the faint bitter beginnings of women’s sweat. She remembers having that snug, fluid skin. Perfect skin. You don’t appreciate it at the time, being dewy, you’re too inside of it to see. Flesh that both absorbs and gives off the light. And so hard to paint, to capture that, to pin that kind of living skin to canvas.

“Which one were you?” Marty asks.

“Hmm?”

“Which of them were you? Look, that one’s the leader, right?” The one who looks fourteen but isn’t yet, leggy, wearing a sixteen-year-old’s halter top and miniskirt, who knows not to blow-dry her curly blonde hair but to let it swirl, who knows what they’re roaming and watching for. “She isn’t the oldest, but she gets it, she knows what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Sarah says.

“Then that one, with the baby fat, she’s older, but she’s scared. She’s scared of the blonde, but she wants that, to be like that. She’s thirteen, fourteen, but she’s really ten. The little one there, she’s sweet, just a kid, but she’s modest, you know? How she’s dressed. That’s nice. Like how you dress, the long skirts and sleeves. Tzenius , that means modest.”

“I don’t know if I was any of them. I don’t remember being that young,” says Sarah.

“Yeah, you’re so old now.”

“See? I told you. My youth is gone. It’s over. No more whimsy.”

“You’re like a little girl, still. You’ll get married, have kids. .”

“No kids.”

“What do you mean, no kids? You got to have kids.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t want any. I’ve never wanted to have kids.”

“Why?”

“I’m. . just not into it. Way too much responsibility.”

“Huh.”

“It’s really okay,” she says with a laugh.

“There’s that saying that adults think they make babies, but it’s really babies that make adults.”

“Not always. Not necessarily.” She finishes her Diet Coke, and tosses the cup in a trashcan near the bench. “And are you saying I have to have a baby in order to be an adult?”

“No. But it’s an important way.”

“I agree. But there’s other ways.” She watches him chew at his lip again. He hums. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. You know, whatever. Come on, let’s walk.”

“You look. . I don’t know. Not happy.”

“I’m happy.”

“You’re not nervous about the show?”

“No, I love this, I love doing this. That’s why I’m here. Me and the guys, we’ve been doing this twenty years now. Russell, the DJ, you know, for the radio station? We go back twenty-five, thirty years.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“Yeah, well. .” He peers at her, and she decides he’s happy with her, that he thinks she’s perceptive. She smiles a little, trying to look sensitive and understanding. “So, sure, I feel funny,” he says. “It’s Saturday. I feel guilty being here.”

“Oh.” She gets it. “Because it’s shabbes.” He nods. “But this isn’t work. It’s not like Julius, off manipulating capital. Committing usury. You’re not defiling the Temple.”

“Maybe this’s worse. More self-indulgent, maybe. Like I’m just playing around, not being serious about it.”

“Like you’re not honoring God?”

He hesitates, then nods again, slowly. “I don’t know, God, I don’t know if there even is a God, but yeah, what you mean by that. Whatever.”

“You don’t believe in God? How can a religious fanatic not believe in God?”

“I’m not a fanatic. You think I’m a fanatic?”

“No. I’m just trying to provoke you.”

“You are?” He seems glad. “That’s good. Okay. Look, it’s about that consciousness, you know? It isn’t just—”

“Blind adherence to an irrational and sexist belief system.”

“Right, yeah. It’s about a spiritual consciousness. The laws, the customs, that’s all bullshit, you know? That’s all religion . I don’t study Torah to just memorize that stuff, I’m talking about what they call religiosity , that’s the longing, see, the real creative longing. Awareness. You want to hook into this mystery, this thing at the core of it all, in everything you do. You have to create it with every single act. Maybe that’s communion, God, I don’t know. You got to search for it in every act you do, every decision. Every choice. You know what sin is, real sin? Inertia. Refusing to act. Refusing the responsibility for your own life.”

“Right.” She feels at a loss. “Okay, I get it.”

“In the Baal Shem it says ‘the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob.’ We don’t say ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ right? Because each one of us has to search for it. Our own sense of the divine. Of God. By doing . Being in the world. You see what I mean?”